January 27: Matthew Williams (McMaster)

Distributed SUSY Breaking: Technically Natural Vacuum Energy from 6D Supergravity
In this talk, I'll present an extra-dimensional brane-world model which breaks supersymmetry through a non-local condition: flux quantization. After reviewing the properties of a particular set of solutions to the bulk field equations -- and explaining why the 4D curvature vanishes at the classical level for these solutions -- I'll demonstrate that the leading-order quantum corrections to the vacuum energy are technically natural, and have a size set by the Kaluza-Klein (KK) scale. Finally, I'll present exclusion plots which underline favourable values for the 6D gravity and KK scales, as a function of the mass of the brane particle whose loop breaks SUSY.